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> The single best resource we used in reverse engineering was an unfinished IEEE submission draft courtesy of the WayBack Machine. In fact, MikroTik's implement
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The single best resource we used in reverse engineering was an unfinished IEEE submission draft courtesy of the WayBack Machine. In fact, MikroTik's implementation is nearly identical to the draft's proposed protocol. See if you can spot the minor nuances and marvel (as we did) that the shared secret remains the same.
That's a surprising twist. They duplicated the protocol from this unfinished draft almost exactly, but the draft doesn't appear to have gone anywhere (hence the archive link)
I wonder if the same person who wrote the paper consulted on this implementation, or if the MikroTik team just saw the paper at some point and decided to use it.
- wiml 5y agoThere are a surprising number of internet-drafts that died before reaching RFC status but nevertheless were implemented, even became widely implemented standards. The sftp protocol ("filexfer" over ssh) is one example. Does anyone know why this is? I've never been closely involved in the RFC process; is there some hard-to-clear hurdle at the end of it?
- Kadin 5y agoThe draft standard was an IEEE proposal, not an IETF one (RFCs are specific to the IETF standardization process), but it seems like the author was pretty familiar with the IEEE process and is involved with that organization. Maybe it was just a solution looking for a problem at the time of its proposal? Honestly, I'm not sure exactly whether the exotic encryption choices (strange, little-used elliptic curves, etc.) actually add much security, or if they're window dressing.